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"Yet the Librarians Were Not Without a Cunning Plan"
Ortwin de Graef
(Talk for the Fiesole Collection Development Retreat, University Library of Leuven,
Belgium, April 08-10, 2010)
Ours is an age of growth fundamentalism and institutionalised distrust—otherwise
known as quality control.
I’d like to make use of this occasion to say a few words on how the ideologies of
growth and quality control by quantification affect the publication of research in the
humanities today, and then give some indications of how a consortium like Open
Humanities Press, partly in alliance with university libraries, proposes to address the
current crisis in the Humanities.
But before I do so I ask you to indulge me as I briefly explore some of the constitutive
contradictions of growth fundamentalism. I appreciate this kind of talk may perhaps
seem inappropriate in the present context, yet I hope it may help to explicitate the
location I am writing from to address a condition we all share but which affects us in
different ways.
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Growth fundamentalism affects every area of human endeavour, and like most
flourishing ideologies, but in this case with unusual and disarming explicitness, it
masks the contradictions riddling it to the core through specious recourse to a
naturalising master trope. What could be more natural than ‘growth’ as a model for
human enterprise? Perhaps nothing, but that doesn’t make it alright—for there are
good reasons to suspect that natural models as such are not necessarily good
templates for human historical practice. Not simply because humans are somehow
un-natural animals—which they are—, but more interestingly because tropes
modeling human behaviour through natural analogies paradoxically tend to forget the
first thing about the nature they derive their authority from.
One feature of growth that growth fundamentalism itself is constitutively in denial
about is the logic of limitation that determines natural growth and binds it to life
understood as continuous metabolic activity. Organisms grow and then they die and
there’s an end on it—but the economy, the master model of the human animal in the
modern condition (stupid!), must keep growing. It might be objected here that, yes,
organisms must die (though there may be some debate here about intricate ancient
fungal set-ups), but they transmit the information that defines them in networks of
exponential multiplication that can cover the planet. Consider grasses, for instance,
one of the most successful life forms on our planet—partly because they cleverly
piggy-backed on another even more successful species--: they just keep growing. It
is precisely the apparently limitless growth potential of grass that accounts for its
successful cultivation of humans as priviliged carriers of its genes. A moment’s
reflection on the basics of metabolism reveals that limitlessness as an illusion, fed by
the typical herd behaviour of grass and its characteristic hardiness—but it is an
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attractive illusion, feeding fantasies of infinity as immortality alive human animals are
particularly sensitive to. It is suggestive in this respect that “grass” and “growth” share
an etymological root (so to speak) and that “growth” as applied to humans and other
animals supplanted the Old English “weaxan” only relatively recently (roughly 14th
century). For “grow” is less haunted by its other than “wax” is by “wane” and is
therefore a more flexible figure in the service of human death-denial, itself a core
component of growth fundamentalism.
But I digress. All I wanted to do was to defamiliarise the notion of growth which has
twisted the logic of economy away from its concern for the radically para-natural and
constitutively contestible law of the house, and has given it the aura of
incontrovertibility associated with so-called laws of nature, otherwise known as
facts—despite the fact that in natural fact growth is necessarily limited. A deluded
understanding of a natural model is projected onto an area of human conduct to give
that conduct a rule that naturalises it beyond contestation even as it consolidates the
swerve of the human away from the natural. The basic rule in this particular case
being “more is more and that’s the law”—not even “more is better”, for “better”
involves a differentiating value-judgement which fact-fetishist fantasies of infinity tend
to suspend, and at least entertains the possibility of less as an option. And for growth
fundamentalism less is not an option but a transgression of the law.
Applied to scientific and scholarly research, the rule of growth fundamentalism is
what pushes academics to produce more and more stuff. That has become the
nature of academic work—and “nature” is barely a metaphor anymore here: the
groves of academe have long since been cleared and have made way for vast
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grasslands with each blade of grass one of the 1 million scientific and scholarly
articles our species secretes each year. And because this is how the nature of
academic work is now ideologically defined and since it is the nature of ideology to
distrust its subjects and to produce apparatuses monitoring their level of adherence
to what is imposed on them as their nature, something is counting. One of the
wonders of growth is of course that it lends itself so naturally to quantification: all that
is required is adding things up and hey presto: more is more so whoever made more
gets more to make more still. Or you die, but that is not an option, just a scandal.
All this, of course, is a caricature. The real picture is worse. For the one limit to
growth which growth fundamentalism recognises as compatible with its commitment
to limitlessness is competition. More is more and that’s the law—but more in a place
that is likely to lead to even more is better than more just anywhere at all. We enter
the realm of second-order growth: the blade of grass must not just stand up and be
counted, it must not just be seen, it must be seen to be seen—it must be cited. For
each time it’s cited it miraculously clones itself into a new, independently countable
fact, and its genes will boldly grow where no grass has grown before. It will flourish
forever in the rich soil of Planet WoS. There’s a WoK joke here I will leave uncooked
while the bean-counting continues and the facts add up and more really is better but
only when it is really more and can be quantified into a higher impact factor.
Enough ranting. The second-order caricature I have sketched here obviously fails to
do justice to the real practices of scholars and scientists today, all of them (give or
take) committed to producing their best approximations of something that is or feels
true, and expected to release those approximations in the formats and through the
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transmission channels that discipline their disciplines. What I have sketched so far is
an arrogant, jaded and resentful view from nowhere, deeply complicit with the
fetishisation of quantifiable fact it pretends to indict. But it is also a symptom of a
certain anxiety with a specific etiology leading back to a real problem involving
disparities between different academic disciplines. Let’s call them the sciences and
the humanities for short—we all know how complicated these distinctions are. In the
sciences scientists deal with facts, in the humanities scholars deal with bits of writing.
Enough said.
Growth fundamentalism and institutionalised distrust are facts of life—i.e. successful
ideologies—, and therefore require at least a double response: principled defiance
(or grumbling) and adaptation. In the current climate, scientists grumble more than
they need to adapt, and scholars need to adapt more than they can afford to
grumble.
To illustrate the plight of research in the humanities at the present time, here is a
snapshot of a tiny section of the current climate: the Flemish government’s special
research budget allocation system on the basis of output indicators, currently under
reconstruction. The full budget is a fixed sum distributed over the four principal
players in Flanders (Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and Leuven).

65% of this sum is allocated on the basis of diploma’s awarded, staff numbers
and other such convenient quantifiables.

The remaining 35% is allocated on the basis of publication output, and that’s
when things take a bleak turn.
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
Half of this 35% is immediately distributed on the basis of citations in ISI—and as
Thomson Reuters is profoundly indifferent to representative coverage of the
humanities, scholars barely get a look in here.

The remaining 50% of the 35% for publication output is reserved for actual
publications,

but a staggering 85% of that remainder is again reserved for ISI-listed output.
It’s hard to tell the insult from the injury, but the upshot is that publications in the
humanities that are not picked up by Thomson Reuters, including the vast bulk of
scholarly monographs and volumes of papers, have a 2.65% impact on the allocation
of the full budget, while ISI-listed work corners 32.35%. If you happen to be a scholar,
this is where you hang down your head, carry on regardless, or begin to whistle in the
dark. Or all of the above.
Hanging down your head is boring, so let’s skip that. Carrying on regardless is the
default position: continuing your research to the best of your abilities etcetera. This is
arguably the most honourable option, but it is not one that faces the predicament in
terms that are useful to us here. So how do you whistle in the dark? I give two
examples—the second will (finally) bring me to digital publishing.
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VABB
15% of the component for first-order publications (as distinct from citations) in the
Flemish research fund allocation is based on non-ISI listed work. That portion is an
informed guess but it’s not entirely clear to me what it’s based on, so let’s bracket
that for now. The general point is that the system assumes that only 15% of
everything published by Flemish academics is not picked up by ISI and sets aside
2.65% of the total budget to reward this output. In the terms set by the system (we’re
inside the system now, it’s dark, we’re whistling), the question is how to distribute that
2.65% of the total budget across the universities. One way is to just list the bulk total
of anything non-ISI produced in the humanities in each university and divide the
money accordingly. Another way is to screen the non-ISI output, filter out the stuff
that shouldn’t really count since it’s not up to the equivalent of the standards
maintained by ISI—whatever those standards and a fortiori their equivalent may be,
but let’s settle on peer review as bedrock—and see what happens. That’s what I’ve
been doing these past few months, as a member of the grandly named “Authoritative
Panel of the Flemish Academic Bibliographic Index for the Human and Social
Sciences”—a body appointed by the Flemish Minister for Economy, Enterprise,
Science, Innovation, Foreign Trade and Growth Fundamentalism. As chair of the
subpanel on literary studies, I received data on publications of researchers of all
Flemish universities between 2000 and 2008 and had to decide, in consultation with
my panel, on the quality of some 460 non-ISI-listed journals in which my peers had
published. In the end we dismissed about half of the titles. Our list—which will be
known as the VABB (and I spare you the guttural stutters unpacking this initialism)—
has not yet been made public, for we now still intend to start ranking the titles we
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have retained and then need to go through a similar screening routine for books and
chapters in books, which is not likely to be any easier. The good news is that as long
as the list is under construction, we can still move with relative safety through the
corridors of our faculty buildings—once it is released, I intend to stay well clear of
lamp posts.
The important point to bear in mind here is that the principal effective point of the
exercise is the distribution of a tiny fixed sum (7.5% of the money linked to
publications and citations) over the four Flemish universities. At this stage there is no
prospect of actually increasing the weight of non-ISI listed work in the allocation
system. Yet the only reason why I, for one, agreed to participate in this frustrating
and extremely time-consuming process is precisely that: to prove to the scientists
that scholars, too, can set and maintain standards—that, in fact, we can do it
ourselves, without the aid of profit-driven information traders. All of this in the possibly
naïve but life- and ultimately death-affirming hope that the crippling ISI-bias in the
present system may one day be at least partly adjusted.
The price to be paid for this is the certain dismay of many colleagues who will find
their contributions to scholarship scorned. The further risk is of course that the
absolute volume of publications included in the VABB will turn out to be less than the
15% of total academic publication output guesstimated under the current
dispensation. But there is also an obvious threat to the survival of journals—some of
them excellent—that now place fine pieces by academics which lift their profile but
will surely see those contributions dwindle in the future—unless the valorisation of
scholarly work in non-ISI-listed publications which are included in the VABB is such
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that scholars can continue to devote time and energy to work that is not thus
valorised.
(I throw in a side-point for discussion here: the recently announced successor
assessment procedure to the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK, the socalled Research Excellence Framework, is moving away from publication and citation
output indicators in favour of what is somewhat mysteriously referred to as “impact”,
which seems to involve any kind of impression researchers make on anyone or
anything just as long as it is not one of their peers. This may be of interest to
collection builders: the half-thought you may have been entertaining that perhaps
libraries should cancel subscriptions to humanities journals that are not recognised
as scholarly by the venerable bodies judging their stakeholders may well be even
more badly wrong than it probably already was, for in the new order it may well be
publications blissfully untroubled by peer review that have the biggest impact factor in
terms of budget allocation.)
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OHP
But let’s stick to the present state of affairs, and let us suppose for a moment that the
VABB is finalised and implemented as a tool for research budget allocation. A
substantial amount of publications by scholars in the humanities will be effectively
discounted. Assuming average rational compliance and roughly equal effort, a
sizeable body of publications in progress will have to be channelled elsewhere. The
approved journals will be under even more pressure than they already are to process
submissions, and there will be an increase in rejections of manuscripts, many of
which will not even make it to the stage of peer review and will instead be dismissed
by whoever opens the attachment—if they open it. Journals will in all likelihood
become even less inclined than they are now to accept difficult, demanding, risky
writing—spoilt for choice by a growing number of fundamentally conformist routine
contributions. And with such a demand for print space, subscriptions fees are not
likely to come down any time soon, while the creation of new scholarly print journals
to absorb the excess supply makes little business sense given the fact that library
budgets can’t even afford subscriptions to what’s already there. If such is indeed the
vicious scenario, and I think it is, it is time we took control of the means of
reproduction. Which brings me to Open Humanities Press.
Open Humanities Press was invented 5 years ago in the fringe of a conference we
organised at the University of Ghent. Its prime mover is Sigi Jöttkandt, who teamed
up with Gary Hall and others to formally launch the initiative in 2008. The principal
goal was to address the crisis in humanities publishing by catching up with the open
access culture already achieved in the sciences, and this primarily meant solving the
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credibility problem crippling open access in the humanities—a problem the sciences
can more easily pay to go away by means of a variety of business models involving
author-side fees, institutional funding, and industrial strength, all of them involving
money, the lack of which got us here in the first place.
The simple answer was to set up OHP as a volunteer-editor-driven portal for existing
OA journals which could submit themselves for accreditation by a board of
internationally credible scholars whose joint verdict should count as an equivalent to
ISI-recognition. For free. Acceptance by OHP means a journal has been vetted by
reliable scholars in its field as to the quality of its contributions and to the soundness
of its own internal procedures, including peer review. The process is quite
straightforward: an annually rotating editorial oversight group is selected from the
wider editorial board and engages in a wiki-based reviewing process of journals
submitted for accreditation. The steering group monitors the reviewing and proposes
a decision which is then submitted for approval. So far, we have 11 journals on our
list, and soon there will be a new batch.
Apart from communicating this accreditation to the scholarly community, the core
issue now is to have it recognised by funding allocation bodies, and this is where
libraries can also begin to play a more prominent part. A very simple instance: if
library portals would list OHP next to, say, Project Muse or JSTOR, that in itself
would already add to the credibility it deserves. Leuven University’s library, I’m happy
and grateful to say, did exactly that within 24 hours of my request to that effect. OHP
journals are now part of Leuven Library’s collection at no cost to anyone, to the
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benefit of all, not least the users of the library who trust the paths laid out for them by
their librarians.
But librarians can make a much bigger difference still in teaming up with outfits like
OHP to address the crisis in monograph publication. OHP had not initially planned to
take this route, but it quickly turned out to be the obvious thing to do. In 2009, an
agreement was reached with the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing
Office. “Between us, we're developing a model where international scholars coalesce
around areas of interest through a book series and perform the editorial oversight,
manuscript selection and development for that series, often with their own internal
editorial boards and consulting editors. The Scholarly Publishing Office then takes the
finished manuscript and runs it through their suite of publishing services to produce
OHP’s finished online, print on demand and, eventually also, epub books.”1 So far we
have set up 5 OHP book series and we’re planning to release 6 monographs this year
and double that number next year.
And if it all works out, perhaps the punitive subscription fees to mainstream scholarly
journals and databases will come down in the face of successful open access
competition and we will finally be able to stock our libraries with ‘ordinary’ books
again as well. And not before time—a final fact to cheer us all up: the library budget
for English literature here at Leuven the past few years has been such that after
paying our various subscriptions fees we are left with a sum that will buy us an
average of minus 2 books per year.
1
http://openhumanitiespress.org/Jottkandt_13-10-09_LIANZA.pdf
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